


a closed circuit

by isoldewass



Series: carries [1]
Category: Legion (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, i am improvising, s02 au at some point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 16:30:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15755523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isoldewass/pseuds/isoldewass
Summary: It's not that different from being alone. They are too alike to be counted as separate entities. She pursues the differences as soon as she realises they are inseparable.She doesn’t give herself a chance to take after him. She ruins everything. And she builds everything anew.





	a closed circuit

**Author's Note:**

> I had four sentences after the first season. Now I have this. 
> 
> Lenny was- unexpected? But hey you try rewatching s01 and not getting a crush on Aubrey Plaza.
> 
> Canon divergence : after the s02 battle everyone returns to the Division 3 headquarters, Syd doesn’t call David on his bullshit and Lenny is no longer a prisoner.

She likes spicy food. And she hates beer. He can’t quite bring himself to tell her he likes it. She must know that, but he still can’t say it. The sentiment is true for other things. 

****

It's not that different from being alone. They are too alike to be counted as separate entities. She pursues the differences as soon as she realises they are inseparable. 

She doesn’t give herself a chance to take after him. She ruins everything. And she builds everything anew.

****

Kerry goes out late, Cary has to wake up early. He has circles under his eyes for years and eventually, it adds up six years to his looks.

If she can’t age, he’ll be aging for her. For a moment there she is content with how tired he feels. The edge of her mouth goes up, she cocks her head, hands on her hips.

He doesn’t like seeing her like this. There is something mean to her, celebrating her little victories. 

****

Kerry goes out, buys a woman a drink. Any resemblance to Syd is coincidental. If anything, her seeing the similarities is more telling than the woman’s appearance in itself. The boyfriend arrives soon afterwards. He doesn’t look like David, but then again, it’s not about how he looks, it’s that Kerry makes a comparison.

She turns to her left. 

She meets a tall man in a brown suit, smiling at her behind his glasses, and punches him the moment he puts his hand on her. Because the moment he does she sees it. And that is all she sees.

Kerry punches him right away but the damage is done, her skin grows cold and then it doesn’t.

****

Several hours into the night she crawls into the bed. Her skin is pure flame and she seems restless. Her breathing is erratic.

She never did get what she wanted and she wants in, in. To split his bones and put wildfire in _his_ veins. To give it all to him to deal with. 

Kerry knows he doesn’t, can’t know what has happened. And she has to know the consequences are just as real. Everything she gives him is there, on the table and certainly not gone. Cary has to label it, put it to rest. He has to figure out everything from the bits she leaves him with. Is it jealousy? Rage, hurt? Why is he vaguely terrified of some man’s glasses?

Cary can’t even separate what’s hers from what’s his. He certainly couldn’t earlier today. He got so worried when Kerry didn’t show up at the lab, by the evening he couldn’t seem to separate her surges of panic from his own. Were she in any real danger, he would not have known it right away. It, in turn, scared him senseless and reset the whole thing.

She starts shaking his leg, her “I’m here” turning from a whisper to a shout as she knocks over his laptop. 

He gets up to check the screen and wow, it’s 3 am already.

Nothing seems broken and Cary is exhausted, so to hell with the valuable data, he’ll see to it tomorrow. He closes the lid and falls back onto the bed, not minding her outstretched arms.

 _Let me in._ Her hand is on his hip, her nails dig in. Like most things, she just does it. There is no censorship to her so nothing startles her as too much, no alarm goes off even as the confusion ripples off from him and he makes them both shiver. She seems unable to trace the rippling sensation back to her hand.

He is so used to them knowing the same things, he doesn’t know where to start. Wherever it started-

In general, he worries too much. He spent tonight worrying about her and was unable to abruptly stop as her skin turned hot, as he felt goosebumps rising, undoubtedly following the smooth motion of someone’s fingertips. Yet being on the receiving end of someone’s reaction to _her_ left _him_ all alone with the feeling. 

Unable to find something, anything else to hold on to. So he held on to her. He wishes he’d just knocked himself unconscious and slept through the whole thing. 

It’s been two hours and it’s been hell.

“Go sleep on your own, we’ll see about it in the morning.”

She still tries to untangle his limbs, to gain direct access to his chest. But dealing with whatever makes their skin burn right now seems an impossible feat and quite rudely he snaps. “I don’t want this.”

“But you want something.”

He flinches because no one can get this close to the surface and not see underneath. But her. She scratches at it, opens it up and walks right past it. 

Her other hand lands on Cary’s other hip, her whole body turns toward him. 

Kerry moves closer, smelling of cigarettes and perfume and beer of all things, and her teeth are ready to bite into his neck when she says, “ _I_ want nothing.”

That’s what you should say, Cary. Attack instead of looking at her wide-eyed, terrified, slowed down by catching a glimpse of her tongue.

She falls asleep instantly it seems, spends the night in the bed, and catches Cary waking up to fall into him and disappear. Admittedly he feels better when she does. But it is a sick feeling to miss something this close to you. 

He doesn’t know what he wants. And she apparently wants nothing. 

****

They, as in people, everyone, all the time, had opinions on who Cary should like. 

“Don’t date someone in your class.”

That one was his mother's, offered off-handedly. He was talking about Jennifer and Thomas who were _dating_ or whatever the sixth-grade equivalent was. He was complaining about them so much, she turned off the TV and said that, every syllable a punch to his face.

Later on, he discovered she meant "stop complaining about the girl.” To be honest, he didn’t know which one he was complaining about. Both of them. Neither?

“You can’t like her, you work together.” 

That one was whispered to him in hushed tones on his first job. He’s been there a month and didn’t even know who they were talking about. 

People’s commentary made him mad and then his indignation made Kerry laugh.

Admittedly Cary _was_ looking for something as if there was a void he just had to fill. As if people told him he needed someone else and he listened. Which in itself was ridiculous: people had no idea “alone” could not be applied to him. Them.

Kerry never really cared about any of it. Her going out had little to do with loneliness or imaginary obligation. She liked to be on her own, to let people see only parts she wanted them to see. (Kerry was maybe, maybe doing it to prove a point. No one really knew what the point was, but the intensity spoke volumes.) Out of the qualities that were just hers, Kerry had this amazing ability to seem careless. Which as far as Cary was concerned was very attractive.

Throughout the years Cary was getting older and then he was getting old. And yet it happens again, now, inconveniently and unwelcome. Now he is the one telling himself to shut the fuck up and stop. He chooses the one person he can not escape and tries to make her into everything that’s missing. It’s been two days and he knows the patterns of his obsessions, he knows it well enough to recognise the stages early on and try and contain it to the parts of his mind that are just his. It’s inappropriate and scary to him, he doesn’t want her to know it’s even happening.

What he wants is to make a mistake.

****

Choices they make get bigger and bigger. Their consequences have to be considered by both parties. They share a life, they have always shared a life, so it’s easy, it’s so, so easy. Until they stumble onto a place where it isn’t. And then it’s terrifying. Because how do you say something to someone who knows and still doesn’t _get_ it?

They never had to develop their communication skills, not when a flicker of a thought could explain something an entire sentence could not carry.

Sometimes they try to have conversations with words, in their respective bodies and fail miserably. Cary isn’t particularly worried. Having to deal with people on a daily basis he knows their misunderstandings are easily fixed. Kerry grows frustrated though.

****

She calls him an old man way before he looks like one. The discrepancy in their physical states weighs down on both of them.

Aching joints don’t always come from fighting, now it’s “Just the way things are, Kerry, well I don’t like it either.” She bears the marks of his age, growing scared as he grows old. He’ll just disappear on her one day, won’t he?

They talk about Oliver, and he pauses stumbling upon the idea of age, time, death. They are speechless for a moment and then her “Shut up,” breaks the silence.

There is a wave of grief he knows is partly him. And partly her. And partly just grief, human and undeniable. 

****

They watch a show. Ptonomy said it’s important “for your culture, come on.” Nothing important about it, as far as Cary is concerned. But Kerry seems to enjoy it immensely, so they spend hour after hour in front of the screen.

The main guy keeps figuring out ways to bring an episode to its close, his eyes all shiny from the win, the character growth non-existent except for his voice breaking mid-screaming match by the end of the season.

Cary keeps seeing those bright eyes wherever he looks; he feels the tension building up. This time it’s coming from him, for once Kerry is not part of the equation. (She always is, being him, him being her; they had to redefine what “part” means.)

Absentmindedly they merge, tired and lost. She is occupied with revisiting plot points from the show, he sees flashes of it interrupting his thoughts. Cary decides not to fight it and imagines that set of bright eyes in whatever context Kerry finds herself.

He lands on the bed and goes for his belt. Kerry usually goes wherever it is she goes.

He hasn’t felt that way in a while and very selfishly decides to use it to ease at least some of the tension away. Yes, the tension is her, yes, it’s not ideal. But it keeps building up and he fears he wouldn’t be able to hide it for long. He is horrible at hiding. Really, he is, she won every round of hide-and-seek they’ve ever played-

Kerry is still there though in the back of his mind. 

Cary looks around, literally, searching for her. Sometimes with too much on her mind, she can’t disappear all at once. He carefully examines their options. What startles him is the fact that he doesn’t find anything he isn’t already feeling. In a tangled mess of two sets of thoughts, idea patterns, past actions and senses, nothing tells him to stop. 

He dares himself to look closer and still comes up empty. 

It’s subtraction. They know what they don’t feel.

His hand settles on his hip, a vague memory of her fingers there. And just like that, the man is gone from his mind and it’s her, all her. Running, breaking and entering, kissing and delivering speeches. His mind frantically replaces the man’s face with hers. The plot changes into nonsense and dissipates altogether. Man’s bright eyes become this. What’s already happening.

Cary doesn’t know how to put it into words, this pressure on him. He wants to get it right and doesn’t have the first idea what right would mean.

He goes ahead and repeats the usual moves, but ridiculously slow, giving her time to back out; then stops altogether. Because her fingertips are on his wrist, checking his pulse it would seem. She is cold and hot at once, their body temperature completely messed up.

Cary feels her breaths grow shallow and it’s only in part because he had stopped altogether.

“Don't stop breathing, you'll kill us both.”

She says it aloud, near him and very, very close. He had missed the moment she’d separated from him, but the unmistakable weight on the side of the bed tells him she’s there.

Cary forces himself to take a deep breath. It reminds him of the panic attacks Melanie used to have, her lungs unable to hold on to the air, too small and too weak to get what she needed. Which was her husband back, more so than air. 

He is terrified to open his eyes and face whatever she’ll give him.

He is still hard, that’s not going anywhere and the rest of his body feels like it’s dying. Well, it’s about time, and if the bodies could shut down from a sensory overload he would have, a while back. Come to think of it, they are both living on borrowed time-

Her hand finishes him off. His hips push forward in aborted thrusts and she moans before he does. That, he feels more than hears.

“I wanted to see what you thought of him.”

She looks at him now and neither of them thinks about the man’s face. He looks at her like she is an unnamed atom, properties unknown. Just as he watches her every move in case he ever needs to balance an equation. 

“You wanted to know what I was doing.” And she still thinks she wants nothing.

****

Melanie said things to her, things she didn’t want to hear. Nonsense. A bunch of words, strings of sentences, nothing.

But something about being a delusion, having a fantasy, clings to her.

_One of you might not exist._

One of them is surely the real thing, the one who would have been born. The other would be the product of a single change in their ADN. They know she was in her mother’s womb and then he came out. Other than that, there is no data to deduce from. With twins, for instance, there is the one who comes second. It can’t be applied to them, and even if it could what would it measure? What would it stand for? Determining who was there at the start, who will be there at the end- It’s irrelevant. 

_One of you doesn’t exist._

That's a terrifying thought. That night she crawls out of Cary and puts her hands around him. One lands on his neck, the other sneaks under his waist. She holds on to him for dear life and he doesn't even open his eyes.

****

Next time they see each other it's at the lab. 

It’s one of those very important moments when everyone gets into his- their lab and pushes the others to get a better view of wherever David is. Cary carelessly asks her to help him with a particular frequency setting. She appears behind his back and goes to the board, picks up the right cord and aims for the wrong thing.

He pushes Ptonomy out of his way to prevent what would certainly result in David's screams from the tank. Cary grabs her hand and she turns to face him, a cord slack between her fingers.

It's as ridiculous as what Thomas and Jennifer were both so proud of. It’s little and it’s normal, yet- no. 

They go to the diner and try to find things she'll like. She goes through the menu, he allows himself to comment on her choice. 

They feel for a tear but nothing feels broken.

In their room, he unbuttons his collar. She follows his lead and removes her jacket. Cary takes it from her hands, leans over a chair and starts folding their clothes. Kerry chuckles and he turns his head to her, almost frightened. 

They remove their shoes, each sitting on a different couch. He looks up and she is in front of him, holding out her hand.

On the bed, her knees settle on either side of his hips.

She doesn’t look at him, _too busy figuring out the best way to do this_ , she says without words. “Whatever this is,” Cary echoes.

Kerry lowers her head and her hair falls on his chest. Her face goes through a series of random expressions and settles on pleased. Well that, but meaner. Like it’s another one of her little victories. He moves forward despite himself and stumbles it seems on her mouth.

Her hands go around his shoulders, on his back, to his neck. He grasps her waist and gets closer. Another inch and she’s gone.

(It’s mathematics. There is space they have to keep between them to not swallow each other whole.

It’s free will too though. So she isn’t gone and their bodies stay solid, skin to skin. Well, shirt to T-shirt.)

She is all long lines and sharp teeth; and he knows that, he knows he knows that but he is only now discovering what they feel like applied to his skin, mouth, body. His nails dig into Kerry’s hips and he can feel them press onto his own.

He has no moves. Okay, maybe one. Or four. 

He just subtracts what he feels and the surges of pleasure that remain are all her. It’s a mind map to what she likes, and then there are her grunts.

They are embarrassing for her it would seem; she buries her head in his shoulder. They are distracting to him. It’s too overwhelming to get it right.

But they manage. She gets on top of him, rocking her hips and he thinks one of them might just dissipate. Not like she does, but Cary thinks this might just be it for him. His brain slows down and he can feel his thoughts stumble onto each other and stop, never reaching their conclusion. Her head is clear though, full of light and something even brighter, so he holds on to that.

Dissociates and lets her take charge. She seems to be better at this somehow. He can feel her using her fighting skills to gain control over him.

 _Unnecessary_ , he thinks. Ridiculous to even think she doesn’t have it already.

She grins at him and swears the next minute, adjusts the angle and runs a hand through his hair. She sometimes does that, though never like this and it makes little sense at the moment, as she bites her lip. 

Her nails dig into her palm while his leave marks on her wrist. For all the time she had spent inside him-

He knows all of this, all of her, of him, them. Yet no, he doesn’t. Because whatever they are, it’s more than one person. And maybe all people were meant to be this in the first place.

They certainly were.

“Shut up, just please shut up,” she asks.

“How are you that good at this?”

“You are not that complicated.”

She is- violent. He is probably, surely, more fragile, yet, unlike her, can’t bring himself to start moving in earnest.

Were it someone else, were he not him but a person not made of two- 

(he feels like something is ruined.)

She grows tired of it eventually and pulls at his hair. He winces and props himself on his arms, changing the angle and making her moan. She doesn’t see it coming, doesn’t have time to hide her face away and what they are left with is shock and earnest struggle written on her face. His expression mimics hers despite him, which should not come as a surprise, after all, they keep setting each other in motion. 

(and she builds it all anew.)

****

It makes him think of a science fair in his school, a project he was much too proud of. A set of things vibrating on the same frequency. Even then Cary tried to understand what they were made of and that seemed like it could be part of an answer. 

It certainly does now. 

****

She appears suddenly, easily inconvenient yet welcome, always.

In the shower there she is in her clothes, soaked through, looking at him. A spur of a moment decision for both of them. He doesn’t have anything to offer.

He teaches her how to shampoo her hair, she gets on her knees. There is something victorious about this, something he does not feel on his own.

They have witnessed the same people going in circles around each other (recently, Syd and David, an image Kerry wasn’t particularly fond of; some twenty-seven years ago, Oliver and Melanie, a thing Cary avoided at all costs), caught glimpses of the same pornography, yet she takes him in her mouth and he _did not_ expect that.

He realises later it’s not that complicated when she comes with his mouth on her. His hand on her thigh, the other one on her stomach, it feels an awful lot like holding someone in place while setting them free. Everything hurts, from her heels pressing hard into his back to the knees to the muscles. And everything is not enough, even though there is two of them experiencing two sets of pleasure and pain.

Cary says something and it is deprived of all meaning save for the tone of his voice. Low and dangerous and Kerry shivers at it. He thinks they’ve exchanged roles. 

She comes with a silent gasp, scratching at the skin of his tricep. Leaving a red mark before her limbs fall loose. He kisses her hips, her stomach, her breasts. She is coming down from the high, breathing heavily, eyes wide open.

They don’t always come at the same time. He feels the spike in her hormone level, the spasm of the muscles. It’s all random, she thinks. He doesn’t agree. He had been taught there is a pattern to everything. She laughs at him, again and again as they go in circles with the idea.

If anything it’s research when they try again.

****

Melanie sees something change. She can’t quite put her finger on it but congratulates Kerry on her independence nonetheless. When Kerry scoffs in response and walks away Melanie tries to pry it out of the other one. “She is-”

She swears Cary blushes before she gets past the beginning of her sentence.

****

Kerry goes to the gym and hits harder.

Cary reads internet articles on ten ways to tell your best friend has a crush on you and how to communicate better. Quite predictably, none of the search engines can grasp the extent of the keywords. The meaning behind them is very, very far off from the people who are alone in their heads. He understands the concept and doesn’t recognise Kerry or himself in the words.

He had noticed it at a very young age really, all while getting into music and literature- most of the metaphors don’t work when you only sometimes have one heart to begin with.

****

 _Who hurt me-_ “Us.” _-so much I can only trust you?_

Kerry sees Walter. His face has become familiar since the astral plane. She knows the answer. (The distrust of everyone might have transferred to him from her, it might have started the moment he left her all alone.)

****

“Why do I have doubts?” It takes time for Cary to admit, it takes courage to say out loud. Put it into words true enough that she is able to see it as a formed idea. She gets it and has an answer ready within seconds.

“Because every time someone would _imply_ it- you’d get so mad I had to punch them.” She goes around the room, picking up her stuff, fixing her hair. “Now it’s true.”

“Why is it easy for you?” _I have time to think about it_ , she answers in his head. “To weave you into patterns of my life.” He should take some time to do that too.

Later Cary remembers the phrasing she used and wonders who talks like that.

****

She smiles at him and it’s easy to kiss her neck, arm, back, it’s easy to get reckless, try and get on top. She does not grow defensive. She adjusts and still wins somehow. Like she needs to, like it's a game. It's not, it really isn’t.

It's something else they share. He’d bite into her shoulder and find marks of his teeth on his own shoulder. They remain an anatomical impossibility.

Yet Cary keeps sensing this rush of emotion. The victory, the spoils, everything. And he is not even playing. It bothers him that she is.

He keeps track of every involuntary gesture; they have never moved so much in such proximity to each other. Never been separated for so long so frequently. Cary catalogues everything until he doesn't, and she laughs at him.

This time there is nothing mean about her, she is as honest as he has ever seen her. The same laughter scratches at his throat. 

He finishes putting data on paper, drawings it into a graph. There is nothing to analyse here, they knew it already. Kerry spends more time in her body than in his. The critical change, the line crossing over the middle on the y-axis happened a few days ago.

She is making it easier for them to have this. And harder for her to- everything really. One of the most important changes is having to speak up. All the fucking time.

Her thoughts stay in her head. It’s exhausting. Embarrassing. Simple things like a direction, an interjection, a pronoun or a name, everything has to be explained in what seems like excruciating detail. Even to Cary. People should really be able to catch on faster, she is not explaining the title of Cary’s thesis for crying out loud.

On the larger scale, it messes up what they thought was irrevocable truths. He swears he can hear her thoughts sometimes, her voice ringing in his head while she is on the other side of the room. He can hear her in his head loud and clear when they have sex, that’s a given now. But it does seem like the distance is growing. She asks him about the exact words he’d heard and denies everything.

Really, he just misses her.

Really, she is able to keep secrets now. 

****

They’ve always managed to meet new people together. To discover them at the same time, so that no one would be at a disadvantage. To not be left alone if a weird man with weird hair decides to become dangerous. Kerry thinks she’ll never not be mad about that.

The next person they fail to meet together is Lenny.

When she gets into the car and disappears, when they run after her, when they find an army waiting for them- Lenny is still non-existent. A pair of eyes attached to a body that’s not hers, but that’s the extent of it.

It’s when Lenny saves her.

In the middle of a fight Kerry keeps checking up on Cary and does not notice a gun and a woman holding it.

Her long legs, beads of sweat that make the top stick to her torso in this heat, her “No problem” to Kerry’s “Thanks” make Kerry come see her after it’s all over. 

(Lenny has been asked to work for Division 3, well, to work with David on _David_. Something about her presence grounds him. Melanie drunkenly spills to Cary the reason they let her stay. “Lenny has this amazing ability to see the worst in people and right through their bullshit.” On “through” she pokes a hole in her paper napkin and laughs at how fitting a metaphor it is. He is surprised though when she brings a napkin to the next strategy meet up and uses it in a similar fashion.)

She finds Lenny in the diner. It’s the middle of the night. It’s Kerry’s fourth day eating all her meals by herself and she’s getting good at it even if her schedule is a bit off.

Lenny spares her a glance and then slowly tilts her head up. Watches her, carefully, knowingly and wipes her fingers off the tablecloth. She seems almost wise in taking her time, assessing the situation. She settles on a smile, the dangerous kind.

Kerry likes it. 

****

Cary doesn’t.

“I don't care,” she puts on her coat, ready to walk away any time.

“I care about you.”

“I know!” she crosses her arms and goes to the center of the room. 

_More than_ you _care about you. I can't stop you, but please_ , “Please don't make me _like_ her.”  
He spits out the word, the very idea of it not sitting right in his mind.

“Like it would be so terrible.” 

_If we both like her we are both vulnerable_ , Cary thinks yet doesn’t dare say out loud. “D- do,” now here is something he can manage to communicate, “do your thing, but I am- am going to protect you.”

She has her answer ready. _Idiot_.

_Right back at you._

“Maybe it won’t last,” she says as she walks out. His back is turned to the door so he doesn’t see her. And she doesn’t see him for a while after that.

****

Cary is alone in his lab when he feels lips on Kerry’s neck. And then a foreign tongue in his own mouth. 

There is a certain inevitability to it. It couldn’t have been Kerry’s experience, so it’s his perception. He doesn’t know how Lenny genuinely laughs at every one of Kerry’s jokes. He can’t know how confident she is or how caring. How utterly seductive and new she feels. 

All Cary experiences is this. A “hello” leading to a kiss, point A to point B. 

He feels giddy. His clothes get in the way. His skin burns everywhere.

When they were young she’d get mad and pinch herself over and over and he would get a nasty bruise. It’s a lot like this. Well. Different sensations, different intent. He frantically asks her to “Please, please stop” it but- well- Kerry isn't there.

****

Once you get it, it becomes difficult to not have it.

And if before he didn’t want anything more, he can’t really settle for less now. (If only because it feels like settling.) He wants- whatever he wants. She wants the exact same thing apparently, but searches for and finds it in a different place.

****

Syd borrows a metal cord from the lab and when she comes to give it back she spills some of the water from her glass on the floor. Says sorry.

Cary snaps at her.

He wants to fight everyone on everything. Separated from Kerry it seems his under-developed traits spring to life.

(He breaks things that need fixing.)

Kerry always liked to fight. 

Once upon a time, he tried sparring with her. She didn’t win every time, but she wanted to. And he never did.

She didn’t like food, hasn’t yet learned how to ride a bicycle, didn’t have a mother, didn’t know her father (that was true for both of them yet he always felt like she lost more there than he did). Before earning enough money for a membership at a gym, he tried to help her on his own: his four long limbs he couldn’t quite get a hold on (he’d hit a growth spurt that summer) against her angry fists.

She didn’t win every time, but she was happy.

****

“Why?”

He can hear his voice get a pitch higher there, an undeniable worry sipping through the calm exterior. Lenny is getting on his nerves and Kerry seems smitten and he- isn’t. They are completely out of sync. That’s terrifying. 

He wants to know what Kerry falls head over heels for. All he sees is the greasy hair, the drug use, the recklessness, the jokes about _him_ fucking _her_ and he doesn’t even know if Kerry had told her. Kerry laughs like it isn’t about her, them, and where does she get it from and why doesn’t he have any.

“She is funny. Gorgeous-”

 _Not to mention dangerous_ , he interrupts, “She tried to kill-” Cary’s hands start shaking. There is no way she doesn’t see it. He can't settle on the next argument to put forward. They seem too big for her to not have considered. And meaningless if she had and they weren’t enough. 

"And I like to fight!” _You could argue we are perfect for each other._ She says one thing and thinks the other at almost the same time. Besides the obvious struggle to understand both (usually, it’s easy, so it might have something to do with the fact that he just _really_ doesn’t want to) he is having a hard time knowing which one is the right answer.

“At least now I can have it,” she practically whispers. There it is. Honesty, at last.

Kerry doesn’t bother including him in the hypothetical scenario. And it’s not his age or his character. It’s that she had seen him come with her name on his lips and she’d hear his voice break and- hers never did. At some point, even she got what it meant.

“We know what happens. We know it's not the worst.” She raises an eyebrow mid-sentence and he blushes. _Not the worst._ He thinks about the last time she’d come before him, a flash of teeth and a hiss.

Not the worst, hah.

****

Lenny calls her “angry girl” one time. Cary is within earshot and Lenny might not be aware. David laughs at her joke the next minute, picking up waffles from the boat in front of him. Kerry walks by and waves at them behind the glass. Cary doesn’t look up, she’ll find him if she needs to (when they both desperately need to recharge, when their animosity is not enough to keep them apart.)

Ten minutes later she joins David and Lenny, the three of them _hanging out_. She never particularly liked David yet now they seem friendly. Lenny’s hand around her shoulder and another one on her knee must help the tension away.

(Cary can’t see Lenny’s other hand, but her touch burns Kerry’s skin, so it burns Cary’s too.)

Later, in yet another fighting round, he calls it “a misplaced infatuation” and she responds with a curt “More misplaced than what we have?”

****

They are so attuned to each other ever since they started having sex, he knows exactly what’s happening. He can feel her lip being bitten, he can feel Lenny’s hand on her chest.

That’s certainly not something they have agreed to share, yet here it is. And while this might just be an exciting opportunity to study their condition, monitoring and analysing the data can’t help the mess. (His knees ache. Her wrist hurts.)

It’s not someone’s fault. He lashes out not really knowing what turn each conversation will take. There is no clear argument in his mind and he wants to fight her on everything, and he wants to forget how to talk to people that aren’t her.

It makes him a hypocrite. He feels Lenny’s arms, legs and fingers pressed against him every other night and he can’t stand her. There is something to be said about hate sex, the intensity behind his masturbating technique has certainly shifted.

Kerry pretends not to hear his thoughts. That’s the real horror.

They are lying to each other, knowing full well the other realises it too and isn't not doing anything to prevent futher damage. What would be the point- And it’s when they ask themselves that that something breaks. 

It’s Syd dropping yet another cup fall to the floor (she’s been awfully distracted as of late) but still.

****

He passes through the common area and catches a glimpse of their- what’s the word. Spending time together in a way that’s not threatening. Between a fighter and a walking drug addiction, they don’t have a lot of that in them.

They sit on a velvet couch, Lenny’s legs on Kerry’s lap and Lenny looks at Cary’s other self with a tenderness he had never witnessed on her. He’d thought her features were unable to shift into _that._

_She looks at you with David’s sister’s eyes. She smiles and we both shiver, you from lust, me from fear._

Yet- It’s like they are home in this generic space made for everyone and meant for no one. They talk about their day and Cary sits down in the dark corridor, leaning on the wall.

“Do you think it’s a symptom of anything-” Kerry pauses for a second, “that a part of me can’t stand you?”

Now that’s a concept he has never heard her use. “A part of me.” She doesn’t even clarify anything with Lenny. Cary doesn’t know what would be worse: Kerry being so sure Lenny gets it or her not caring about Lenny getting it exactly right.

He watches Kerry lean forward and kiss her, wonders whether it looks that way when she kisses him. Fragile and peaceful. Like she can protect anyone from just about anything. 

****

Once they had three exams in one day. He was the one who was good at remembering things. Stupid things like formulas and lists.

Kerry didn’t want to spend time hiding while he wrote down answers to dumb questions, “You can’t even talk to me.” She spent a day playing outside. She must have been running a lot, he was the only one sweating in the classroom. He kept forgetting the start of the sentence by the time he reached another “thus.”

“Complete the question” stares at him angrily from the otherwise blank paper. 

Incomplete. That’s how he feels. 

****

“Jealousy. That’s what it is.” The word feels foreign on her tongue, but it’s not something to be discussed by shared thought. As a concept, it’s designed for people who always remain separate.

“You are jealous.” Cary can see flashes of tangled limbs and long legs, dark hair and pale skin, whispered words, wild glances with no clear target, all of it part-truth, part-fantasy.

He clenches his fists in a futile attempt to remain calm. But she throws accusations at him, things he does not feel, things she would know if she’d only _listened_. And then she complains about the lack of privacy. Now that’s a low blow. She looks almost annoyed, like somehow this is on him like he is the one watching her, like she is entitled to their lines not being blurry. Like her love life is not assaulting him at every turn. Cary completely misses the point though: she wants to spare him the details.

In a short time _privacy_ has become important to her. And he just doesn’t care. “Well, th- this is not _mine!_ I don't have to be that, I don't value that!”

His voice ripples off the walls. Kerry crosses her arms and her mouth twists into something uglier than his words.

" _I_ value that. So you should too.” Just like that, no explanation offered. Nor asked for. She says it and it's true, just like that. ‘This- this is something that has no relation to you, or at least as little as it can get.”

Every word feels like a punch to the chest. Cary doesn’t even know whether it’s him hurting.

“I can’t _un_ invite you.” _If I could I would._

Somehow that one feels like she is done punching and goes for twisting a knife in his chest.

She gets angrier and he has nothing to show for it. It doesn’t even spill over to him. He just feels- tired. Of fighting, of not fighting, of having to always figure it out first so that nothing gets left unattended and rots and poisons the ecosystem.

But this is real, this is happening. He can feel her fingertips tingle at just the thought of Lenny. He doesn’t get a say. He shouldn’t get a say yet- of course, he should. If he can feel Lenny’s phantom hands on Kerry’s phantom limbs, he should get a fucking say.

There are no laws to this, yet he could spend hours arguing his case. But on the other side of this is _Kerry_.

And she is not little and she is not weak and she is hardly fragile but he wants to protect her; that’s what you do to the people you love. He can certainly manage unexpected hard-ons and the mess between them. She wants to have something with other people and even if Lenny seems like the worst choice (well, technically, David-) he can't rob her of it.

Can't and- doesn't want to.

She is happy, radiating it for miles and he doesn't have to be her to see how beautiful it is. The fact that it hurts him is really beside the point.

Amazing, what you can suffer through if a part of you isn’t suffering at all.

****

Lenny gets a hand in Kerry’s underwear, her fingers moving at a strategically slow pace. They curl inside her and a wicked lazy grin follows the motion. 

Kerry’s back arches, her hips stop thrusting in a pattern. She moves frantically, searching for what they have found so many times, and- can not for the life of her, find again. Cary’s synapses must be all messed up, she can _feel_ his reluctance to do it again. To _indulge_ her. She wants to get to him and punch him. She wants-

****

Lenny knocks. As in opposed to coming in uninvited or crawling out of the darkness on all fours with those bright yellow eyes.

(She likes her women as they come: if they are there at all it means she wants them to be. And this one is strong and knows how to kill a man, knows how to make a woman come. She asks and she begs, she is brutal and when she talks it’s short and to the point. There is something about her that Lenny can’t quite grasp, doesn’t want to really, it’d ruin the fun, but there is something inside her- And it’s a nice enough metaphor until it isn’t, until she remembers it’s _true_ , that there is a part of her, awake and lurking, his doors open and his smile polite, that there is a part of the girl that is a skinny old boy, an old white man, that this body beside her is a part of a whole; and that maybe if she despises him, she can’t call it love.)

Lenny leans against the doorframe, one finger tracing the lines of the wooden panel.

“Hey man.” She seems restless and not quite in her place, which, quite frankly- thank God. She twitches, her foot taps against the floor yet she chews on the two syllables and does not pick up the pace.

“I’m- real tired," she says, “so if you could maybe pull one off for the team, that’d be amazing."  
She pushes herself off the doorframe and turns on her heels.

His eyes widen. She knows- 

And she is okay with it. (That might be the first time Cary actually sees something in her. Might not be.)

****

There are still a few missteps along the way. The irritation doesn't dissipate at once: he still snaps and curses and looks for Kerry.

But her joy is palpable now, it's a full feeling, like the excitement of a coming fight or the moves he can't ignore and ends up executing, a pale (skinny, old, white) imitation of her precise blows. Well, this too spills over to him and he wouldn’t go ahead and say he is happy, but there is a certain joy to everything, a pleasant feeling he had done nothing to obtain and probably does not deserve.

He decides to ignore the holy trinity of shame, guilt and awkwardness. Does his best to work their sex life into his own.

And then, when he is at peace (or as close to peace as he can get) Cary hears they break up. Lenny cheats on her or something. It’s hardly true.

****

It takes Cary too much time to reconstruct what happened on the hill.

He’d thought it would be easy, logical, the next step a clearly-defined well-adjusted follow-up to what he just did. But his mind is blank, has been for weeks. It’s like his genius is dependent on Kerry jumping rope workout. 

That is also why the trap for David fails miserably. Lenny disappears with him and everyone else is left wondering how the hell they had missed it.

Kerry feels less devastated than Cary thought she’d be, that is to say not devastated at all. She feels- well, if he had to name it he would have to settle on blank too.

They come back to each other before the aftermaths of the trial takes over every part of Division 3. He wanders into the diner and sits across the table from her, filling in the paperwork. She drags her punching bag back to the second floor of his, their lab. They don’t say a word, out loud or otherwise, but for both of them the fog lifts and they are capable of operating at a normal speed, just by existing in the same space.

In one of those quiet moments they’ve come to appreciate for the pale imitation of intimacy that they are, she speaks. “Why are you angry?”

He prays he is able to make it seem like he hasn’t heard her. Kerry repeats her question, same words, same tone, a thing he had never seen her do.

“Well I-” _don’t get to be angry do I?_

Cary feels well in his right to deny her an answer. This dull longing, a sharp pain at times, it’s just his. He didn’t even recognise it as anger before she’d said it. How closely did she have to look to name something that wasn’t even fully formed?

She doesn’t interrupt him, he stops on his own. Doesn’t know where to begin, wouldn’t know how to follow. It’s not peace between them, habit, maybe, boredom, surely. Division 3 is developing the next mission and everybody not involved in the debate just sits still.

She says he’d better leave and he does.

****

For better or for worse, Melanie and Oliver get back together. There was no divorce, so there is no need for another marriage. They still throw a party.

Everybody is seated in the biggest room Division 3 could spare. Cary walks over to his table, as indicated by the seating chart at the entrance. Kerry is already there, picking at the fish in front of her. He briefly considers walking away, but she looks up and waves her hand at him.

When he pulls up a chair Kerry shifts away from him, giving him space, taking hers.

Oliver walks over to Melanie and after everything, everything they embrace. She lets him get close and to be seen. In the center of the room, he begins his speech. Oliver had rehearsed it in front of Cary two days ago and though he had surely made some alterations since Cary is pretty confident it will last fourteen minutes. Somewhere along the way Oliver will compare Melanie to a dragon with no explanation whatsoever and move on to the next metaphor. It’s not the best of Oliver’s speeches but it stirs something in Cary, something he would love to move past. It’s the oldest worry in the book really: the vague sense that something isn’t sitting right.

He looks at Kerry trying to take a sip of the white wine they’d put in front of her. Don’t they know by now? She almost swallows it and then spits it back into the glass.

Cary smiles and the same smile tugs at the corner of her mouth though she doesn’t seem to notice. He is only half-listening to Oliver, mesmerised before his alternate self.

Cary comes back to it when someone starts clapping. Oliver still managed to make half of the crowd tear up. Clark is the one who clapped first, sobbing, mouthing the word “dragon” like it does hold a special meaning after all.

Everyone gets up and starts clapping in earnest. Kerry pushes people out of her way as soon as she is on her feet.

Oliver brings it to a close with an “I love my wife.”

And it looks so easy, at least from the outside in, and Cary knows, knows it took years and memory loss, possession and a ridiculous amount of ice to get to this and it might not even hold. Yet they stand there together talking about their shared future and Cary feels a wave of sadness wash over him.

Turns out Kerry found out the event would not include fighting of any kind at the exact same time, so who is he to judge on the origin of this sadness.

He leaves the party when everyone is still dancing. He is terrified of Melanie sitting down next him and asking about Kerry.

In the empty hallways, he still manages to run into her. She doesn’t waste any time, gets to what is bothering her without any introduction. “Why are you angry?”

He still doesn’t know where to begin, but a part of him (Kerry) wants to hear him speak.

Cary braces himself and starts talking. He speaks in long sentences, tossing the thread more than once. He forgets the words and wants desperately to quote Sartre in the original French.

Cary tries to tell everything from his perspective, how he fell for Kerry, how Kerry fell for Lenny, how he could _feel_ it every time, every thing- and gets lost, doesn’t know what’s redundant and what’s new information to her. 

When he arrives at “And of course I am angry, of course, I am angry at her, but mostly- at you!” they are near his, not their anymore, room and things stopped _matter_ a while ago so he goes ahead and says “And I can’t be angry with you, I am in love with you.”

Why the hell did they decide to sort it out in the hallway?

He can feel she is at a loss. Strangely, his confidence is growing. Just like that, they’ve switched places, again. Just like that, he has nothing else to lose to her.

And then she ruins that too.

_She said that. Lenny said that too._

“And?” There is a primal horror to his words. Something that in itself could swallow the world whole.

But before she can answer when she is still putting right words in the right order, he has something of a revelation. Lenny isn’t here. And whatever happened there, he did his best not to interfere. Now, this, here is about them alone.

_And I say it now._

Cary adjusts his glasses. “You have a-” The song coming from the party seems to want to help, the “hold on my heart” part, in particular, is loud and clear.

No. _No._

_Not my heart. My whole life. You are everything I have, all I am._

He doesn’t have to say any of that. He doesn’t say any of that shit. Because they both knew it by the time they were nine, well eight and a half in her case. 

He opens the door to his room and she walks in, her shoulder brushing against the fabric of his shirt.

_Be with me._

He was terrified of falling for her, with how messy and wrong and unholy and entirely too close it turned out to be. (Maybe there is such thing as too close. Their whole lives they thought they are the one possible exception to every rule: death, birth, physics. What it means to be a part of something. What it feels like to be whole. They managed to circumvent every definition.)

"I don’t know how to do- this.”

She gestures to the empty space between them, her finger pointing at her and at him and then at her chest again. As a concept, _this_ (something, anything that comes between them) is brand new. First, there was nothing, then, there was Lenny.

“What happened with you two?”

_You._

He can feel something in him wake up and pay attention. Something mean and wicked and satisfied. 

“Me,” she goes on. _Her._

“So, everything?”

He sees the memory from the school fair from her perspective. Everything is loud and boring, unnecessary. As a part of the background noise, he himself talks about different frequencies. That's as close to explaining as she gets.

“Sorry.”

No one in this room is sorry. 

No one in the goddamn building is sorry. Ever. For anything. So why bother.

****

He knows her better than anyone and for the first time he realises it can be a threat.

They grew around each other, quite literally. He grew on her. Stole her body, her mother, not to mention a dad. A childhood. Entire years when it seemed everyone spent the decade partying he, they spent buried in books. It’s not his fault, but he got it and she didn’t.

He should have done more of that partying. Like when she talked him into going to a soirée and he ended up meeting Oliver. Granted, they met on the balcony trying to escape the crowd. And yet in a way- it’s all her doing.

Every person deserves to make their own choices. They had to share. So things like privacy, being alone, being on her own, being lonely- _I am robbing you of that. You are robbing_ me _of that._

“Like-“ _Farouk_. The man’s face (Oliver’s face, Lenny’s face) flashes before his eyes. They are not parasites but someone is trespassing. “In- in many ways that’s me.” _Or you._

He remembers describing the nature of a thing inside of David’s mind before it even had a name: “learning him systems, bypassing his defences.” That’s what they have been doing all their life, even if it’s more symbiotic, even if they are not _evil_.

What he wants so desperately not to say is that it’s better this way. That he is dying. He says “Growing more independent might help-” instead and doesn’t mean it, being apart is not how they are meant to exist.

“Don’t you worry about that?” she asks, concerned about what this “independence” might to them.

 _No_. “I think I’ll sooner be dead.”

There is accusation in what she thinks next. In general, there is a fair amount of terror woven into her thoughts about the future. She should be able to exist alone. Someday she is going to be on her own, unbothered by the most mundane of things. Someday she is going to say words over his grave and be done with it.

Not yet though.

****

She is sitting on his desk. He sees her knees near the edge of the table, shiny teeth, shiny boots. He walks over, closes the distance while counting his steps. He wants to get to her and disappear into them. She doesn’t want that.

A precise movement of her hips, the fingers of her right hand around his throat, her left palm on his chest. He can’t fight like she can but he knows the angles of her body, he can recognise the placement of a hand for what it is. A threat.

He doesn’t remember this from before. Maybe it’s something she’d picked up with Lenny, maybe he is searching for threats now and didn’t before. He isn’t afraid; she traces the line of his collarbone and he thinks, _you could slit my throat and I wouldn’t notice._

She is violent, lethal. She enjoys being that and he should know better. He should know better by now, especially since she is more her own person, since there are parts he does not recognise, things he is not responsible for. He should talk to her, _what about?_ she asks.

How they would fuck but not merge, how she opens up her legs for him and wouldn’t tell him why she wants it.

 _I want_ you, she says.

She unbuckles his belt and his hands move forward too. That’s what has been missing.

With her and Lenny, that’s what’s been missing. The evident follow-up to every gesture, a silent understanding that spreads beyond physicality and establishes a new kind of intimacy. A thing that exists just in the space between them, the only ones who are able to share a life and still lead two.

“They don’t see what I see.” She pulls at his collar, kisses his jaw. “I can’t show them what I have seen.”

They, whoever they might be, whoever they were, don’t echo her movements, don’t follow blindly wherever. They ask questions and don’t hear answers, they have lives of their own and she already has two, and she can’t take on another one, not properly.

 _They love you and don’t love me,_ Cary adds. _And you can’t stand it even if I’ll learn how to._

She keeps whispering things in his ear, things with no meaning, things he has trouble deciphering. 

They are not on the same frequency, quite far from thinking the same thing. But he is here, she is warm. It’s overwhelming on its own.

_We are feeding off each other. It's a closed circuit._

**Author's Note:**

> They were watching Suits. Fight me.


End file.
